Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

Smash Ultimate is let down by its terrible netcode. I can play literally everything else on my wifi without issue. Why can't they figure it out with Smash Bros?

@Ralizah Agreed, especially for a fighting game you'd think they'd get their act together when it comes to online. I even play with a wired connection and it hardly makes a difference. It's easily the worst part of Ultimate.

I like lego city undercover.
Its like GTA but lego and it runs fine imo, its fun to just drive around the city messing around when playing 2 player.

@StarPoint It's disgraceful. People like to blame NSO, but I don't have this problem with most other Switch games online. The developers don't receive nearly enough blame for this aspect of the game.

@Ralizah Sakurai is funny but sometimes he is kind of annoying.
The thing that ticked me off was when he said that once he dies Smash games would start to suck (or they would struggle to keep making games that he works in) like bro im sure they would be completely fine, take a page out of Myamotos book. (he said that they would be fine once he dies)

Seeing Rise talked about above, is it time for me to finally drop my, I hated Sunbreak take? Cause I hated Sunbreak.

I appreciate a small, but very vocal, slice of the audience wanted to tell everyone that base Rise wasn't their Monster Hunter. They wanted the slow, drawn out, brutally punishing, slogs of past games back for some reason. I don't understand it, I never will.

I thought Rise showed the perfect foundation for a better future for the series going forwards. And I sadly think based on how Sunbreak played out, Rise is not the future of the franchise like I wanted.

Sunbreak took all of the joy of base Rise and replaced it with brutal spikes in difficulty, and cruel punishments if you weren't perfect for every frame of your gameplay. The joy of base Rise for me was the power I felt as I slowly mastered my weapon, and built out my gear set to suit my playstyle. To me there is no fun in feeling powerless, but despite a wealth of new abilities and armour based skills, powerless was all I felt in Sunbreak. I hated it.

@Pizzamorg The whole point of these expansion DLCs is providing the sort of challenge and mechanical depth that series vets come for. It's similar to the approach Nintendo often takes with their games, where the main story is fairly accessible for younger players, and then much of the challenging content comes during the endgame.

That said, Sunbreak's G-rank equivalent difficulty wasn't nearly as intimidating as what I encountered in a game like MH4U. You're probably better off just sticking with the base versions of these games going forward.

@GalaxicGlobe Never a huge fan of the cult of personality that forms around some of these developers, and it's hard to avoid concluding that some of them take this adulation to heart. All I'll say in regard to Sakurai in the interest of politeness!

Maybe in the past, but it didn't have to be this way here. Rise showed a different (and to me, far superior) version of a how a Monster Hunter game could be, that included the difficulty paradigm. Sunbreak could still have delivered everything it delivered, without the unnecessary and astronomical difficulty spike and the complete removal of all player power. But clearly they buckled to the pressure of the small vocal minority who complained Rise was too fun and not miserable enough.

The rampages in Rise sucked, and I do hope they never return in future games.

Sunbreak went a long way toward alleviating most of my disappointment with Rise, though, so it's still very much one of my favorite Switch titles.

@Pizzamorg It's fine to enjoy easy games, but base Rise was too easy for a lot of vet players. To the point where it just wasn't nearly as fun, because, for a lot of us, the thrill of MonHun is found in mastering challenges that seemed insurmountable at first.

Rise's crazy mechanics mean even the expansion never hits that level of challenge for many of us, but it was challenging enough to be fun again.

Which is the thing: you enjoy games more when you don't have to struggle at all. Whereas other people enjoy games like this more when there's a struggle involved. Capcom's strategy with Rise allowed them to cater to both sets of players. Or, if you want to look at it in a glass half-empty way, only partially satisfy both sets of players lol.

In fairness, the Sunbreak expansion doesn't even start getting properly difficult until the point where you complete the story, so you should still be able to enjoy the main campaign.

I would say base World is significantly harder than base Rise was. And I would say earlier games before that were even harder still. So if the Monster Hunter design moving forwards is the base game being tuned like Rise was, and expansions being tuned like base World or higher, I'd be fine with that. My fear with Sunbreak was that it was a total buckling, that the vocal minority won and we'd never get a fun Monster Hunter game like Rise again. If we get a Rise style Monster Hunter game every new base release, then you can all have your expansions that make you miserable. I'll just play the base games moving forwards and skip the expansions.

@Pizzamorg I genuinely don't think so. These games used to get re-releases with a harder difficulty setting (G-rank). Now the G-rank equivalent is an expansion DLC instead of a full re-release. The plan was ALWAYS for the expansion to be significantly harder, as that has been the traditional pattern of this series.

World being more accessible was a huge part of its appeal, and while Rise didn't do World numbers, it still significantly outsold other older entries. Capcom isn't going to be stupid and go full FromSoft on the series and return to the glory days of the base campaign kicking everyone's butt.

Out of interest, how would you say World was in terms of difficulty for you? And did you ever play Iceborne?

@Pizzamorg Welcome to G-Rank. The game stops playing around and expects you to learn the monsters you're fighting against, along with grind a ton. This series isn't for those who don't want to sink time into the grind effectively. If you already dislike souls games, this game isn't really for you.

@NintendoByNature @FishyS Yeah. It's cool that people like the games and I wanted to get into the series, but it just wasn't meant to be. Another Capcom series I couldn't really get into was Street Fighter, and that's only because I'm not good at fighting games, lol. I do like the Mega Man series, though.

Yawn.

It is honestly hard to say. I think my first game was maybe Tri on the Wii? But I was young, played it very casually and not very long. So World was really the first game in the series I played properly and to date I’d consider it one of the hardest games I’ve ever “conquered”.

Rise felt significantly easier, and to begin with I wasn’t playing with the same friends I played World with, because it was on Switch which they didn’t have. But by the time I played Rise, I had played hundreds of hours of World / Iceborne and gone back to some older games too. So it is kind of chicken and the egg, would I have found Rise harder than World if I had played it first? I dunno.

And yeah I played Iceborne too. I found World so hard at the time, the difficulty in Iceborne didn’t feel like an astronomical leap from the base game in the way Sunbreak did to me after base Rise. To be honest, a lot of World / Iceborne’s difficulty came from all those crazy one shot moves and just sort of how slow and clunky everything was, rather than moment to moment difficulty. The lightbulb moment for me in World when it all clicked was switching to the Insect Glaive, as it gave you a level of speed and mobility nothing else did in that game, and much of the challenge became easier to overcome when I could just dance through the sky. A common lesson I guess, given the shift to the Attack on Titan style of action in Rise.

Sunbreak was mostly difficult in a different way, mostly in that it sorta tricks you by punishing you for doing anything Rise conditioned and trained you to do. Base Rise is all about high tempo, aggression and pressure. Sunbreak is very much a shift back to the older games, where it is about patience, picking your moments and having good defence. You play Sunbreak like base Rise, and you are about to be midair combo spammed that goes so long, you could take a smoke break, a bathroom break and make your dinner, and come back and still be getting smashed into the floor. It is not easy to do a complete 180 like that, when you’ve spent 100s of hours playing one way, and now suddenly need to play completely differently with the same toolset.

Funnily enough, while the damage was poo, my lightbulb moment in Sunbreak was an inverse response to my one in World. In World I needed to become faster, smoother, to overcome the challenge. Sunbreak, I had to learn to slow back down again, so switching to the Lance was one of the best experiences it had. It was about the friendliest way one could recondition themselves for the pace and rhythm, decoupling myself from everything I learnt from the base.

I think Lance is probably going to be my main going forwards, it is probably the least fun and least sexiest of the weapons, but you won’t be your best Hunter, until you’ve mastered the lance, and learned and gained all the tools and skills that come with doing that.

@Pizzamorg I'm just tired of people acting like hard games have no right to exist. If the devs want to make a hard experience, then they should be allowed to make the experience they want. Sorry that you don't like G-Rank, but it's been an intentionally hard part of the game.

I stand by Sunbreak/G-Rank being hard.... and think it panders to that level of audience that are seeking 'challenge' (somewhat similar to Souls community I guess).

I loved my time with Sunbreak, and agree at times it was/is gruelling - but that was part of the appeal for me. Good builds, grinding, practice can all look to mitigate the difficulty - but it is intentionally a difficult experience.

I'm certainly not a 'gate-keeper', and actually would consider myself quite pro-accessibility.... but I strongly believe that not every game can be for every player. For instance - by Dark Souls adding an arbitrary 'easy mode' it would actually alienate its entire core audience. Sometimes trying to appease everyone means that you actually dilute your wider impact.

This argument will go around in circles for as long as we are alive. I just personally don’t agree that difficulty should fall into the ‘not for everyone’ category.

A turn based RPG is not for everyone, and demanding the game be real time is an unrealistic ask, as that would make it a fundamentally different experience. Adjusting damage values or whatever, however, doesn’t change the actual core mechanical experience, I guess you may emotionally come away from the game in a different place as you haven’t had the game curbstomp you or whatever, but if that is the only value the experience gives you, and everything else is arbitrary, then that doesn’t seem like an experience worth having, to me.

But difficulty is not a flat line, what is hard to one person, is not hard to another. And vice versa. There is this - to me anyway - very strange mindset that somehow a game’s identity and purpose will become lost, if a player is allowed to tailor a game to their needs. I just don’t understand this.

I played Elden Ring on PC, and modded it to turn down the amount of damage bosses did per attack, but I still experienced those bosses mechanics otherwise in full. I still had to learn the bosses, and overcome the bosses. I just tuned it to my skill level. People can say I didn’t have the ‘true’ experience, but I experienced the mechanics in full, with slightly adjusted numbers, so I think their argument is silly, personally.

In terms of Rise specifically. Yeah, I dunno. Sunbreak was such an astronomical leap in difficulty over Rise, it basically became a different game, as it required a completely different toolset and set of disciplines to overcome than the base game did, fundamentally altering the experience. I didn’t experience this in World to Iceborne, so was not expecting it. If this is the way things will be tuned in future, I am now properly prepared to give these expansions a wide berth.

You literally have an entire genre of games dedicated to satisfying this need. Get over yourself.

Days without easy mode discourse: 0

People always say developers shouldn't have to sacrifice their artistic intent, and sure, I don't disagree with that, but I can't imagine there are many developers who actively want their game to be inaccessible to people. The point of good difficulty options isn't to make completing the game trivial, it's to allow people to adjust it to their own skill level, so a less skilled player playing on easy mode will have roughly the same experience as a more skilled player on the normal difficulty.

Anyway, I think I've said these things before and pretty much every point that can be made about this has already been made on this thread, so I'll just link to this GMTK video instead: https://youtu.be/NInNVEHj_G4?si=egtFbzQ3hXaye7Pb

Exactly this. This is where this argument always falls down for me, when people make assumptions that hard and easy are these flat, base, concepts that apply equally to everyone. They do not. The idea that somehow the artistic intent is lost if someone is able to tailor the difficulty more to them despite the mechanics being completely unchanged, is just such a surreal argument to me. It is why I love games like Control which offer rich, granular, options to really tailor it to your personal skill level. The idea that Souls games can’t do this is silly. It has also been disproven time and time again, both by Souls games that have just included these options and by those modders who have modded them in.

I just personally feel like games that make you learn how to play them should be allowed to exist without allowing for the player to adjust difficulty.

@Pizzamorg Yet you always find a way to complain about games in those genres.. like you acknowledge this genre exists, but then always say how the game isn't something you like because of how difficult it is, or how it felt like a waste of time. All I can say is maybe don't play the games if they clearly aren't for you?

Edit: And my issue isn't that you dislike these games. You can dislike what you like. The issue is that you constantly bring up how Devs shouldn't be making games like these, or at least it feels that way. It always comes across as a bit entitled generally? There's many different experiences out there, and some are just catered towards different people. This has the same energy as those who complain about Final Fantasy no longer being turn-based, when there's other turn-based RPGs out there.